Section the first (4/2) Some intro stuff Questions? Tyler Schnoebelen tylers at stanford dot edu

Agenda Howdy’s and how aaaaare you’s Your thoughts and questions Some key terms in E&Mc-G Some metaphors, too Generic he (Gaskill 1990) Consumerism (Talbot 1992)

Detour: setting goals Specific Measurable Actionable Realistic Time-bound

Some basic things to get Competence Speech community Community of practice Lexicon Subdisciplines in linguistics Phonology Morphology Syntax Discourse Semantics Pragmatics We distinguish two types of competence: The original concept—if you’re competent in English you just know that you can’t say: *were have plums that icebox the I in the eaten Communicative competence says that when you first meet someone you probably don’t say: #Hello, you look like a puffy-eyed female Stalin Speech community is defined on E&Mc-G 56; community of practice is on the next two pages.

Lots of movement Social moves “Discourse turn” “Performance turn” Every contribution you make to an interaction carries out your intentions with respect to the others. We have goals. “Discourse turn” Language is interactive, dynamic It changes over time (and over the course of a conversation) “Performance turn” Categories are socially constructed You “do” gender” “Continually produced, reproduced, and indeed changed through people’s performance of gendered acts, ast they project their own claimed gendered identities, ratify or challenge others’ identities, and in various ways support or challenge systems of gender relations and privilege” (E&Mc-G: 4).

Market How does the linguistic market metaphor work? E&Mc-G: 55 for a first intro paragraph

Gaskill (1990)

Twitter break “After a patient eats, he needs to rest.” “A person is only as old as he feels.”

He/she/they Why do we care? Gaskiil (1990: 631) reports Martyna (1978): the natural process of imagining oneself to be the subject of a neutral human reference has somehow been short-circuited [for women]. Ninety percent of the women in my study reported no imagery at all in response to a sentence about a general human being, and the 10 percent who did reported seening pictures of males The closest Gaskill seems to come is that a male-bias for generic he “could reinforce itself in sexist thought and behavior seems eminently plausible, as previous feminist scholarship has shown” (639). Gaskill also says that “generic he interferes with effective communication” (640).

Talbot (1992)

Talbot’s goals “A linguistic model of discourse that integrates linguistic and social theoretical perspectives so that discourse can be analyzed both as interaction between individuals and as socially reproductive and constitutive of subjectivity”

Deconstruction The author is dead Or rather, the author is legion Multiple Fragmented

Ideal subject Sort of like the representation we saw in generic he Mass-media producers get to imagine the addressee They control “commonsense” Conclusion: “The audience is being offered sisterhood in consumption. Synthetic personalization and the need for adult femininity catch readers up in a bogus community in which the subject position of consumer is presented as an integral part of being feminine” (Talbot 1992: 579) Cosmetics and naturalness

Appendix

Style My use of language tells you something about me I can also use language consciously to try to tell you something about me We’ll look more at “style” later on in the course, but keep in mind that we’ve got to account for conscious and unconscious attitudes/behaviors

It adds up To build a model of what’s happening in this course, consider: Small verbal acts accumulate to have a large effect So how do individual situations produce and reproduce abstract social structures? More on this as the course continues